Your Learning, Simplified

Diigo 7.0 is perhaps the most significant version upgrade in Diigo’s history. We are confident that you will find the new Diigo to be the most powerful personal knowledge management tool that can help you harness information, build coherent knowledge, and speed up learning.

From pieces of information to a coherent knowledge structure

With this upgrade, Diigo makes it significantly easier to go from pieces of information to a coherent knowledge structure, which all pedagogy theorists agrees is one of the most important steps in learning, memorizing, and writing.

An important innovation introduced in Diigo 6.0 is Outliners, which allow you to organize information as knowledge trees. The importance and benefit of knowledge trees in learning are perhaps best articulated by one of the greatest innovators of our times, Elon Musk:

I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying.

One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.

— Elon Musk

While outliners are powerful, going from information collected and digested to knowledge trees still feel disjointed and awkward. So a key innovation in this upgrade is to enable a split view with outliners and my library side by side:

With this split view, one can

Read an article on the left side, drag-and-drop specific bits to specific locations of the outliner tree shown on the right side.

Drag an item in My Library shown on the left side to specific locations in the outliner tree shown on the right side.

After the user has built a coherent knowledge tree, he can then export the outliner to a word processor for further editing. The split view therefore seamlessly integrates the multiple steps involved in writing papers, from collecting, reading and digesting information, to connecting and organizing pieces of information coherently.

Heads-up for future improvement: The Diigo extension is being reworked to provide the same seamless experience from reading, annotating to outliners.

Better UX with modern feel.

With its advanced annotation capability, Diigo has been the best way to collect, read and digest information, both webpages and PDF documents. This upgrade just makes it even better with a sleeker UX and modern feel.

The new UI is not only better looking, but also simpler and easier to use. There are many small improvements waiting for you to discover, such as “in-place tag editing”, new “bulk edit” feature, better “Generate report” etc.

Annotate directly on Diigo.com without the extension.

Previously, if you want to annotate an article, you need to install Diigo extension or Diigolet. Very often, the article webpage is cluttered by ads. Now, you can have immersive reading experience for articles in an ads-free environment in the new version. Even better, you don’t need to install extension or Diigolet to annotate on web pages.

We want to express our appreciation to all users who participated in our beta testing. Your input has been valuable and helps to shape the new Diigo. And we are not done innovating yet! Just wait and be pleasantly surprised🙂

For the past few months, we have been hard at work on our website revamp. What started with the intentions of mainly updating our UI, made us take a step back and really consider what Diigo has evolved into after all these years and receive feedback from our users. After getting in touch with our cherished user base, we are beginning to plan our future direction. Here is a quick overview of the incoming changes. Please note that nothing is set in stone yet, and we will continue to evaluate all feedback from our users.

When Diigo was created almost a decade ago, our goal was to provide our users with a simple platform to organize your online content and easily annotate web resources. While we have achieved these goals to some extent, we have allowed more and more features and functions to creep in along the way, resulting in an experience that may feel confusing or bloated, especially for new/casual users. Thus, we realized that we cannot clean up our UI without focusing on the functions that our users really appreciate and phasing out certain features that have strayed too far in other directions.

A major change will be our movement away from ‘social’ aspects in Diigo. While we may have been swayed by the ‘social media movement’, at the end of the day Diigo has always been more of a personal platform. The ‘Discover’ section, including ‘networks’ and ‘communities’ will eventually be phased out. This section has always been very underused, yet takes a large amount of resources to maintain. This change will also simplify user profiles, which will focus mainly on each user’s public library, removing functions such as ‘follow user’, ‘public search’ and ‘message user’. This will allow us to focus on improving Diigo’s core experience.

‘Groups’ will also be evolving to the benefit of its main users, educators and enterprises. Almost all of our active groups have been focused on education or private content sharing within corporations, so groups will be evolving into ‘Diigo Teams’, which will also add specific functionality for each usage case.

We will keep you updated on these changes as we approach our final direction, and would love to hear from you regarding these developments. Please leave your comments below or feel free to drop us a message via care@diigo.com.

Thank you for your continued support of Diigo. With your support, we can make Diigo better for you.

When Diigo was released ten years ago, our goal was to provide a social bookmarking/annotation service which would serve our users in two ways:

To provide the best online bookmarking/annotation tool assisting our users’ reading and research online.

The second is to leverage our users’ collections to create a social knowledge network to provide insight on what their friends and people with similar interests are reading.

Fast-forward to present day, Diigo has accomplished the first goal reasonably well, and through continuous improvement, we have maintained our leadership as the most popular and feature rich online bookmarking/annotation service in the world. Our goal to become a social knowledge network however has clearly been eclipsed by social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Quora.

Therefore, ten years later, we are at a major crossroad with a huge decision to make. Should we forgo our aspiration to be a social knowledge network, and remove all social features?

As our social functions are some of the least used portions in Diigo, yet require constant maintenance, this would allow us to focus on providing the best personal online annotation/research platform for our users.

As always, we would love to hear from you, our cherished users, and take your input into consideration. If you do use some of Diigo’s social features, let us know which specific ones you would like to keep or see enhanced.

In an effort to focus our resources to our website upgrade, we will be removing the ‘My Messages’ function from Diigo by the end of February.

The ‘My Message’ function has been rarely used, and does not fit in with our future plans for Diigo as a personal and collaborative research platform. This, along with the plethora of messaging platforms available, results in this function being phased out.

We apologize if you have come to like this function, please understand that we will be bringing many more benefits with our upgraded site very soon

Check out this great guide from ‘coolcatteacher’ on how to use Diigo Outliner to boost your productivity in the classroom or your research studies.
Have you started any Outliners before?
Let us know how you feel about it and how we can make it even better!

We have made big adjustments to our PDF annotation toolbar. The bar has been simplified and given a more modern, simple look to allow you to focus on the content. Features on the toolbar have also been streamlined to provide just the right amount of functionality for PDF review and sharing.

The issue with PDF annotations not showing spaces between words in the annotation menu on certain PDF files has been fixed. Annotations will now show in their intended format. This improvement has been long due, however the complexity and amount of development to resolve this issue was substantial. We think you will be quite pleased with the result of our work.

Before Update:

After Update:

We have also made the process of selecting text in PDFs more precise and intuitive. Text selection no longer requires pinpoint control, and will not jump to another section in certain cases as on our prior version.

Overall, these changes and improvements will help you get the most out of your PDF research and sharing. If you are new to Diigo, or haven’t had the chance to try our PDF Annotator, feel free give it a try. Most in-depth research documentation and information depositories are offered in PDF format. Get the most out of your research by adding highlights and notes directly to the document, and share the knowledge easily through Diigo, your learning, simplified.